


Silent and Velvet

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Max dreams of dead people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:14:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3970588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He follows her because he's sick of following ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent and Velvet

Max watches people die. They are people he has loved, though the word has lost all meaning. They are people he _feels strongly_ for (maybe). Or they are people who deserved better. Or they are people who didn't deserve anything. Maybe they are just people who he could have saved. He doesn't remember names, he can’t connect the words with the faces, but they tell him he could have saved them, that he _should_ have, and he believes it. 

Sometimes Furiosa is there, though she had been alive last he knew. He remembers her name. It is the dirt under his wheels, her name is scrawled the length of the Fury Road. He thinks it means she must be dead now, somewhere far away. He wonders how it happened, she clung to life same as he did. She knew it was the only thing left. 

He decides that he will go back, just to see if it’s true. He thinks that maybe the dreams will stop if he sees her alive, or if he knows for sure she’s dead. He doesn't think he's made of the right sort of stuff to be a Seer, but maybe he has been around so much death that it’s stuck to him. Like blood under his fingernails. Like split knuckles. Like the tiny spark that turns a car into an inferno. He looks at the red skull on the dirty map he keeps tucked in his boot. He’s low on guzzoline anyway. 

His plan is to reach the Citadel, watch for some sign that she has survived, then leave before she knows he’s been there. He’ll siphon the guzzoline from whatever wreck is lying around, there’s always one, the remains of something trying to crack open the nest egg. It won’t be the fortress it was when the old man was in charge. It won’t be a death trap. He won’t end up in a cage this time. But there’s gas there, and water, and that means cars will break themselves against the cliffs trying to take it.

They see him before he sees them, and that’s his first mistake. His second mistake is that he doesn't turn back as soon as he realises this, as soon as the flare bursts above him, black against the blue. It makes sense that they would monitor anyone coming close to them; he wonders if she already knows that it’s him. He needs the guzzoline, he reminds himself, and he puts his foot down. 

It’s the redhead who greets him. The girl who turned their dead War Boy theirs. She is standing by the gates of a walled city, because that’s what it is now. A city of corrugated houses with the green heads of the cliffs rising above them. There is a trench ten feet out from the wall, stakes lining the bottom, and Max does not make the third mistake, he does not try to drive through the gate. He stops just shy of the trenches and the redhead raises a hand.

“Max,” she says, and her voice is the voice of a thousand dead. He remembers the bride called Splendid, falling under the wheels. This bride has changed, she is not all in white, she is dressed in leather and has binoculars around her neck. “You’re here for Furiosa?”

“‘m here for guzzoline,” he corrects.

“You’ll have to see her either way.” 

He follows the girl into the Citadel. The slaves in rags are gone, they have more flesh, they are no longer skeletons. Even their clothing has improved some. The hungry look in their eyes is gone too and Max wonders if he will ever lose it. He thinks that they might look at him with pity, if anyone who’d survived this long could pity anyone else who did the same. He follows the redhead and the Sprog is next to her, looking back at him over her shoulder. He blinks, and blinks, and blinks, until she’s gone.

Furiosa is alive and unchanged. He isn't sure what he expected; she will die when the road dies. She is fixing a truck, there are War Boys helping, except they aren't War Boys, they’re clean of their silver and their white. Some of them are sick. Most of them will die. But for now they’re helping Furiosa to fix a truck. 

The redhead smiles at Furiosa and leaves. Furiosa looks at him, frowning, hands on her hips. She has a new arm, he notices, and it is as much a part of her as the other one had been. He feels like he should say something, but no words come to his lips, and he nods at her instead.

“Max,” she says, and he swallows a shudder. “You’re here for guzzoline?” 

“If you've got it.” 

“Of course,” she says easily. She moves toward him. “Gastown has a new leader, we remade the treaty. The Bullet Farm too.”

“I’ll take a gun then.”

“Of course.” She smiles. He remembers when he saw her smile last, when she’d found her people, and then after, the smile gone, when she’d lost it all again. “Come with me.”

“If anyone touches my car, i’ll kill ‘em,” he tells her as they walk, and her smile widens.

There are tunnels in the cliffs now, homes built into the rock, and the people who work the lifts aren't slaves. The big one, the one for vehicles, is ignored, held up high and out of use. The cars are kept on the ground now. Furiosa stops for a moment, to help some people who are hauling bundles of something up into the higher reaches. Max watches and tries to ignore the whispering voices over his shoulder and the ghosts flickering at the edges of his vision. There are steps cut into the cliffs now, and Furiosa takes him there, and they climb in silence. 

He follows her further, into the dark, and he remembers the War Boys chasing him, and he remembers the bite of a needle in his arm, and the sudden shock of water, and he closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, she is looking at him, and he turns to the walls instead. They are carved and painted with patterns; the road, the flares, the falling water. She is not leading him to guzzoline and guns. They will be kept down with the vehicles now, not up high where Immortan Joe could hoard them. He doesn't care. Furiosa is alive. He follows her because he’s sick of following ghosts. 

The room she takes him to is large and open to the sky, roofed in dirty glass. There is a bench covered in pieces of car, and tools, and a chair, and a bed, and little else. (Except the garden, tucked in a corner, planted green things that stretch up to the sun). Furiosa takes the chair and Max paces the edges of the room and tries to stretch out his shoulders. The voices have stopped, and he scuffs his boots across the floor to make the silence less overwhelming.

“Are you staying?” she asks him, and he stops, rests a palm on the bench, picks up a piece of scrap metal and turns it over in his hands. This is a question she knows the answer to. He keeps his mouth shut. “How long then?” she concedes after a beat.

Max shrugs, and drops the metal back onto the bench.

“I need gas, and water,” he chews on his lower lip. _I wanted to see that you were alive_. The words sit uncomfortably in the back of his throat, and he swallows them. 

“And you’ll get them,” Furiosa says. “You need food too, by the looks of it. And sleep.” 

“I don’t sleep easy,” he tells her, watching shafts of sunlight drifting across the green of her garden. 

“Neither do I,” she says. “Neither does anyone.” 

Max looks at her bed (because this is, undoubtedly, _her_ room), a cobbled together pile of worn mattresses and blankets. He has slept in a car or on hot sand every day for as long as he can remember. He has not slept for more than four hours at a time for as long as he can remember. He is not one to dream of soft pillows and sleeping until noon, but it is tempting all the same. Up high, somewhere safe ( _nowhere_ is safe). He swallows again, and frowns at the bed, at the garden, at the sunlight.

“What is this?” he growls, finally turning to her.

“Nothing,” she says, shrugging gently. “It’s a bed.”

“It’s _your_ bed,” he points out. His hands are shaking (his hands are always shaking), he did not come back here to feel caged again. He did not come back here for beds and whatever goes with beds. She is watching him from under her eyelashes, she looks infuriatingly calm. Furiosa of the fury road. 

“Use it,” she says. “I don’t care, I have work to do. It’s a bed.” 

Max wants to laugh; he chews at his teeth instead. He remembers the day she’d beat him half to Hell, he remembers that vividly, but he’d got some shots in too, and _he’d_ taken her rig, for all that she got it back again. She is watching him like she doesn't know what he might do but she wants to find out. Most people watch him like he’s going to crack and get dangerous, it’s the wiser choice. It doesn't matter anyway, he decides, it’s a bed. He drops his bag to the floor, shrugs his jacket off with it. Furiosa relaxes visibly.

He walks across the room and drops onto the bed. He pulls his boots off. Furiosa doesn't move from her chair. 

“Your feet are disgusting,” she says, and he hides his smile by scrubbing his hands across his face.

He doesn't take any more of his clothing off. He shuffles around until he’s sitting at the top of the bed, leaning against the wall, feet crossed at the ankles down the length. She stands up, comes over to him, and then she’s sitting down too, and he’s as rigid as a corpse and blinking dead things from his eyelashes. 

“Max,” she says, and he holds his breath. “Why are you here?” 

It’s an easy question, he thinks, and he relaxes back into the comfort of the cushions and tangled blankets. (Furiosa is a restless sleeper too, he wonders if she’s ever hurt someone coming out of a dream). 

“I’m tired of following ghosts,” he tells her, and it’s the truth. She smiles, and it’s sad at the edges, like she knows more about him than he does. Like she knows the names of the death that clings to him. He sees the deaths on her, the Splendid Angharad and the Vuvalini and the flickering blur of a mother, gone after three days.

“Stay as long you like,” she tells him, her voice gentle, and she kisses him on the cheek, so swiftly he knows he will lose it in his nightmares, and then she’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this was Max Takes A Nap, which did not actually happen in the end. Oh well. This is about as fluffy as I feel comfortable going with them right, which is weird and probably won't be true for long. Anyway. This is pretty much the same as the other fic I wrote except from Max instead of Furiosa. There are differences I suppose. Thank you for reading!!


End file.
